Hanne Mugaas
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Prior to joining OCA, Mugaas was the Founding Director and Head Curator of Kunsthall Stavanger, serving as its driving force from its establishment in 2013 until 2025. Under her leadership, the institution gained national and international recognition for its ambitious and critically acclaimed exhibition programme. Alongside building the institution, she established numerous international collaborations and partnerships with organisations including MoMA PS1, the New Museum and Rhizome, Performa, Tate St Ives, and Goldsmiths CCA. She also made education for children and young people a central institutional priority.
At Kunsthall Stavanger, Mugaas curated a wide range of exhibitions, including the most recent Ebecho Muslimova: Fatebe Shadows (2025), Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally (2024), Mark Corfield-Moore: We Speak Chicken (2024), and Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings: Bleak House (2023–24). She presented major survey exhibitions, including Judith Bernstein: Rising (2016) and Kiki Kogelnik: Inner Life (2017), both of which featured significant works that had not been shown since the 1960s. Her additional curatorial projects span numerous large-scale solo exhibitions and commissions with artists such as Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, Emma Talbot, Farah Al Qasimi, Hanne Lippard, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Peggy Ahwesh, Yngve Holen, and Nicolas Party, among many others.
Mugaas also expanded Kunsthall Stavanger’s reach through digital content and programming, commissioning a range of online projects, including the performance Lina Viste Grønli, Peter Child and Elaine Chew: Practicing Haydn (Piano Sonata in EB, HOB XVI:45 Finale)(2013) as part of Performa 13, the participatory project Stine Janvin: Mouthpiece (2022), and the conference 7x7 (2020), a collaboration with Rhizome and the New Museum.
Mugaas’ editorial work includes the monograph Judith Bernstein: Rising, published by Mousse with texts by Maurizio Cattelan, Johanna Fateman, and Thomas Micchelli. The publication was the first to contextualize Bernstein’s expansive oeuvre within the broader framework of feminist art history and American socio-political discourse. She also edited the monograph Kiki Kogelnik: Inner Life, published by Hatje Cantz in collaboration with the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, with texts by Jenni Sorkin and Wendy Vogel, focusing specifically on Kogelnik’s sculptural work, as well as her performances and happenings.
Before founding Kunsthall Stavanger, Mugaas spent a decade in New York, where she held curatorial positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She also co-founded the project space Art Since the Summer of '69 with Fabienne Stephan and Paul-Aymar Mourgue d'Algue. Described by The New York Times as "among the tiniest galleries anywhere in the city, with exhibitions of twee things that accommodates at least one Big Idea," the space became known for its experimental programme, and for accellerating the careers of a number of young artists.
Since 2004, Mugaas has curated exhibitions and projects at venues including Studio Voltaire, London, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia, Performa 9 and 11, New York, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, and Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. She has served on the boards of OCA and Bergen Assembly, and participated in numerous international panels and juries, including the Frieze London Stand Prize, the Nam June Paik Award, and Glasgow International’s Across the City Panel.
Mugaas is currently working on developing OCA’s public programme and publishing from 2027.
Photographs on this website were taken by Erik Sæter Jørgensen, Helle Navratil and Bent René Synnevåg.
Selected press and writing:
Artforum: Top Ten: Hanne Mugaas
Mousse Magazine: Kiki Kogelnik, Inner Life at Kunsthall Stavanger: Hanne Mugaas and Michael Clark in Conversation
Kaleidoscope Magazine: Martine Syms by Hanne Mugaas
Kaleidoscope Magazine: Super Images, A Roundtable with Olia Lialina, Ed Fornieles, Takeshi Murata, Jonathan Horowitz, Darren Bader, Katja Novitskova and Guthrie Lonergan
Kaleidsoscope Magazine: Judith Bernstein in conversation with Hanne Mugaas
Kaleidoscope Magazine: Torbjørn Rødland in conversation with Hanne Mugaas
Kaleidoscope Magazine: Decoding Curating: Hanne Mugaas
Flash Art: Ida Ekblad interviewed by Hanne Mugaas
Frieze Magazine: Beginnings + Ends
The Take: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s first blog (initiated by Mugaas):
Filling in the Cracks
The Rise of an Empire
The New York Times: The Mood of the Market, as Measured in the Galleries by Roberta Smith
NBC New York: Art Interns, Overworked and Underpaid, Create an Exhibition to Call Their Own
The New York Times: Art in Review: As Small As It Gets at Art Since the Summer of ‘69 by Karen Rosenberg